In feature

Happy Fountain Pen Day! (Giveaway & Special Offer)

Author AnaPosted on 178 Comments
Happy Fountain Pen Day! (Giveaway & Special Offer)

Happy Fountain Pen Day, friends! I hope you are having a chance to play with your pens, get a good deal from any of the many vendors offering special pricing, and all the wonderful things.

In honor of Fountain Pen Day, we have a special giveaway!

We are giving away (1) one Pilot Custom 74 in Blue Stone with a Medium nib (MSRP $176USD). This is a beautiful pen with a slightly bouncy 14K gold nib.

AND any orders placed on Etsy or Big Cartel this weekend (through Sunday, November 5, 2023) will a free Shark Pen and ink sample (while supplies last). No coupon needed.

TO ENTER: Leave a comment below and tell us how you are celebrating Fountain Pen Day — or how you wish you could celebrate. Play along and type in something. It makes reading through entries more interesting for me, okay? One entry per person. Multiple entries will be disqualified.

If you have never entered a giveaway or commented on the site before, your comment must be manually approved by our highly-trained staff of monkeys before it will appear on the site. Our monkeys are underpaid and under-caffeinated so don’t stress if your comment does not appear right away. Give themonkeys some time.

FINE PRINT: All entries must be submitted by 10pm CST on Monday, November 6, 2023. All entries must be submitted at wellappointeddesk.com, not Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook, okay? Winner will be announced on Tuesday (or Wednesday). Winner will be selected by random number generator from entries that played by the rules (see above). Please include your actual email address in the comment form so that I can contact you if you win. I will not save email addresses or sell them to anyone — pinky swear. If winner does not respond within 5 days, I will draw a new giveaway winner. Shipping via USPS first class is covered. Additional shipping options or insurance will have to be paid by the winner. We are generous but we’re not made of money. US and APO/AFO only, sorry.

Oops! Forgot to mention: DISCLAIMER: The items included in this post were provided at a discount by Gentleman Stationer for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.

In Link Love

Link Love: Good bye, Inktober. Hello, Nanowrimo!

Author AnaPosted on 3 Comments
Link Love: Good bye, Inktober. Hello, Nanowrimo!

Today we say good bye to Inktober and hello to Nanowrimo. I love monthly projects. When I can commit to a daily project, I really enjoy them. But, I am sure, like everyone else, somewhere around the 15th, the real life day-to-day throws those projects over. But I commend everyone who even attempts these. So, if you are so inclined, start writing your great novel, biography, or other book. Or, if like me and Laura, launch into your Nakniswemo (National Knit a Sweater in a Month) project instead. Whatever your endeavor, we are cheering you on!

NaNoWriMo:

Pens:

Ink:

Notebooks & Paper:

Art & Creativity:

Other Interesting Things:

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In news

Trick or Treat: Sailor North America decreasing prices on select collections.

Author Laura CameronPosted on 4 Comments

Not a trick, maybe a treat? I spied this post a week ago on @sailor.pen.northamerica:

Ana and I mulled this over and came up with many possible reasons for the announcement:

  • The success of the “don’t miss the boat” sale in the last few months?
  • An increase in “grey market” sales where folks are ordering direct from Japan to avoid North American prices?
  • North American retailers having extra Sailor inventory in stock (due to the price increase and folks buying fewer Sailors?

We don’t have any answers, but we wanted to share the news!

P.S. Happy Halloween! If only trick or treating included stationery and supplies!

 

In feature

Survey: Is that ink wet or dry?

Author AnaPosted on 11 Comments
Survey: Is that ink wet or dry?

Nicole S over on Pen Addict Slack asked me (and other pen community bloggers) to give a shout out for her survey on inks and whether they are wet or dry.

Nicole S is a physicist and has tamed up with a rheologist to look at characteristics of ink. Part of this is determining how people perceive the wetness or dryness of a particular ink.

Her request is simple, just fill out her survey here.

Rank the listed inks on a scale of 1 (extremely dry) to 10 (extremely wet) based on your own experience. If you’ve only used one of the inks, that’s fine, just rank that one. Used a bunch of them? Awesome, rank them all!The more FP users we can get info from, the better we can correlate our rheological results with the subjective ones, so please share the link and encourage your pen friends to participate.

Here’s to advancing ink studies and understanding!

In feature, Ink Review

Ink Review: Monteverde Color Changing Ink Set

Author Jessica ColesPosted on 4 Comments
Ink Review: Monteverde Color Changing Ink Set

Were you one of the cool kids in elementary school or middle school or even high school who had access to markers that could change color? These markers came with several saturated colors and a marker with no color. But if you wrote with the colorful markers and then used the marker with no color on top of them, the color would change! The clear marker would change each color separately so you could impress your friends with your magic ink.

Thank you to Dromgoole’s for letting me review this set and feel like I can be part of the cool crowd.

I never did have those markers. Either I was too old when they were introduced to the market or I wasn’t cool enough – I’m not sure. However, now I can relive that disappointment with a new set from Monteverde – Color Changing Inks.

The set comes in a nice magnetically closing box that looks great on a bookshelf, saving you space in your ink drawer. It consists of 9 colorful inks and one clear color changer bottle.

The color changer ink is a bit thicker than normal inks but has little to no odor and leaves no trace of a mark on paper.

I decided to start with filling up a few Kakimori refillable felt tip pens, but I swatched the following cards as I normally do – paintbrush and a dip pen.

This part was so fun! Each color changes differently with the addition of the color changer ink. Some, like the black and brown, change rather slowly and can take several minutes to fully change. Others, especially the Green and Blue, change as soon as the color changer touches them.

I learned through trial and error that you should let the first ink totally dry before adding the color changing ink. Also, be careful if you go back over your clear ink with a second coat as it can spread.

The color changer ink acts almost like a bleach pen, but not as harsh to the paper.

You can see in the swatch below that the color changer pushed slightly to the edges of the heavier swatch. A fun effect to watch.

As a graduate from Virginia Tech, I deeply appreciate the Burgundy to Orange color since it is the school color combination.

You can see a dark version of the color changed pink haloing the entire swatch of the Dark Blue ink below – almost like the deep blue portion shrank back to reveal the color underneath.

The Fuchsia ink was nearly bleached to white with the color changing ink, but the ink itself feathered quite a bit in the swatch below – Cosmo Air Light paper.

The Pink that came from the color changing ink on Green ink is a unique combination – the pink comes through as rather dark at first but lightens over time.

I also loved the Purple to Yellow combination – a very dark ink that lightens dramatically to Yellow.

The Red ink seemed to be closer to orange than actual red.

You can see on a few of these swatch cards that some colors performed poorly in the feathering department, although this is not enough for me to not use the ink.

 

Below is the Monteverde Color Changing lineup on Midori MD paper:

The Monteverde Color Changing lineup on Tomoe River (TR7) 52gsm paper:

Finally, the Monteverde Color Changing lineup on Cosmo Air Light paper:

The set as I have shown it is available at retailers who carry Monteverde inks for $124 or $13 per ink bottle and $7 per bottle of color changer.

Which color duo is your favorite combination?

DISCLAIMER: Some of the items in this review were provided at a discounted rate for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.

In Link Love

Link Love: Postage Notes

Author AnaPosted on 2 Comments
Link Love: Postage Notes
RGB postage stamp Field Notes Edition

Did you know that the USPS is doing stamp collaborations with Field Notes now? That’s right, you can get a Field Notes pocket notebook with the most recent stamp release on the front with the official cancellation. There are waterfalls, famous people, holidays, The Peanuts Gang and more available on a Field Notes. Check out the current USPS Philatelic Catalog for all the current stamp releases. There are some really beautiful designs.

Pens:

Ink:

Notebooks & Paper:

Art & Creativity:

Other Interesting Things:

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In Paper Review

Paper Review: Musubi Pocket Folio Notebook

Author Laura CameronPosted on 1 Comment

This week I was delighted to dig into reviewing a somewhat new product: Musubi’s Spica Bond Pocket Folio Notebooks (SGD20 for a set of 3, approx. $14-15). These are another one of the goodies that Ana brought back from the SF Pen Show for me to try.

I’ve always been a fan of Musubi. The owner Daryl is completely transparent about what he is trying to do: create beautiful writing tools and notebooks that fully support artisans who hand make many of the products. The Pocket Folio Notebooks are just the newest to a wonderful product lineup.

There are a lot of pocket folio notebooks out there to choose from, often at similar price points. This particular one comes in a slim A6 size (90mm x 140mm, or 3.5″ x 5.5″. The books have cardstock covers and sewn binding, reinforced with tape.

The paper itself is Spica Bond 75, a white 75gsm paper made from 25% cotton. The books are available in blank, lined (7.2mm) or cross grid (5mm) and each book contains 48 pages.

The notebooks come in eco-friendly packaging of cardboard and ribbon. And here is why I love Daryl’s products so much – he truly thinks about how every part of the product and packaging can be used. The cardboard used to hold the package of 3 notebooks together is actually perforate and designed as index cards. These cards can then be used to sort your notebooks (for easy storage in any box that can store standard 3.5″ x 5.5″ index cards or photos). The only part of the cardboard that is “waste” is the small tab connecting the two index cards. The ribbon can be repurposed to be a bookmark, or used to tie the notebooks back together.

So let’s talk about the paper a little more. The paper is smooth to the touch and my pens glide across it easily. One thing I do really like is that the cross grid still absorbs the ink as normal – in some notebooks the ink is repelled by those grid points making it harder to read. I don’t see any feathering on the front side.  As for the backs, it’s not bad news. There is some bleed through where I reinforced my lines (the musubi up top) and when I used larger nibs (the Sailor Music nib I used for “pocket notebooks are the best!”)

Even so, I think these notebooks are perfectly functional for an every day carry. I can see carrying one in my purse or pen case (specifically the Sinclair) to jot notes, quotes I want to remember, to do lists, or more. And again, I appreciate that if I want to keep the notebooks as an archive of my daily life, I have some handy index tabs to sort them by! Are they the cheapest notebooks on the market? No, but it’s roughly comparable to other popular pocket notebooks like Field Notes and a number of other smaller brands. However, if you want to support a business that is committed to creating great craftsmanship and ethical production, I can’t think of a better place to shop.

DISCLAIMER: Some of the items in this review were provided free of charge for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.